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Food Sovereignty Puts Control Locally

Food Sovereignty Puts Control Locally

For the pamphlet in full-colour PDF format to download and distribute, click here.

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY:

• Places control in the hands of local food providers

• Recognizes the need to inhabit and to share territories

• Rejects the privatization of natural elements 

 

Food sovereignty calls for forms of food governance that involve civil society, producers and consumers.

Wayne Roberts, Toronto, ON

According to Wayne Roberts, manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council (TFPC), “The TFPC keeps community food security and food policy on the municipal agenda in Toronto. Since 1991, the Council has been a forum for discussing, integrating, and acting on food policy issues that often fall between the cracks of established municipal departments and research specialties. The 30-member TFPC supports scores of programs with the shared goal of ensuring equitable access to food, nutrition, community development and environmental health, acting as professional lobbyist for the people on food and related issues. The Council is free to make its own decisions on food policy issues. Staff working with the TFPC are employed by, and responsible to, Toronto Public Health. This arrangement has gained interest from public health, community food security and sustainable agriculture organizations around the world.” 

  • TFPC championed the Toronto Food Charter, a declaration of citizen rights and government responsibilities that sets the food security standard for municipalities across Canada. Food Charters have been adopted by municipalities and provinces across Canada.

  • TFPC founded the Rooftop Garden Resource Group to research and promote a green roof industry in Canada.

Food sovereignty demands respect for other nations’ sovereignty and their culture.

Bernice August Heather, Salmon Arm, B.C. - Secwepemcul'ecw (the land of the Shuswap)

“Before I was taken from my family and forced to go to the Indian Residential School at the age of 5, I remember our family using all the traditional foods. I remember where we got our hazelnuts, cedar roots, wild berries, greens and root vegetables. We also had the farm. Sle7e (grandpa) had a really big garden with 9 fruit trees, chickens, and cattle. I remember not having a concept of reserves or boundaries, we moved freely on the land to harvest our foods throughout our traditional territory. Being on the land was good for our physical, spiritual, and emotional health. We had wild salmon and lots of wild deer meat. Our family would meet at Woods Lake to go get kokanee. The family doesn't go there anymore because it is contaminated.

  • Indigenous peoples have been displaced from their traditional land and food systems, many live in urban areas and have little access to traditional foods. Their health suffers as a result.

  • Indigenous land and food systems provide an abundance of local traditional foods within the natural boundaries of each Indigenous nation. However, their ability to harvest traditional foods has been limited by reserve boundaries imposed by the government.

Food sovereignty refuses the privatization of life and the policies that enable corporations to profit from it.

Dan Jason, Salt Spring Island, BC

Dan Jason's Salt Spring Seeds focuses on high-protein crops – beans and grains – that can be grown in a home garden. “As seeds,” he says, “beans and grains join the past and future, carrying the dream of a planet where all live in peace, health, and joy. Corporate agriculture's current pursuit, trying to make all seeds proprietary, terminates in termination. I'm saying, 'Let's go for the glory'.” The Seed and Plant Sanctuary on Salt Spring Island is a community seed bank, committed to maintaining, evaluating and keeping records for all the edible, medicinal and useful crops that can be grown in Canada. As a sanctuary, it will work with gardeners and seed savers across Canada and beyond, to protect, exchange, and maintain seeds in the public domain.

  • A handful of corporations, led by Monsanto and Dupont now control most of the world's market in seeds, especially the core commercial crops of corn, soya, canola.

  • The privatization of seeds in North America has taken three approaches:

  • Legal: Plant Breeders Rights legislation and patents on life forms, which includes seeds

  • Biological: hybridization and genetic engineering, which make it difficult or impossible to reproduce seeds

  • Regulatory: the framework developed by the government to facilitate corporate control through private contracts with farmers (eg. "Technology Use Agreements")